CPD
Developing yourself – and your colleagues
In these tough times, in-house CPD delivered by colleagues
for colleagues can be very effective. Margaret Adams offers her advice
schools are giving lots of attention to whole-team development these days and this affects you, even if you are not your school’s CPD expert. As in-house team development becomes more popular,
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you are more likely to find yourself involved in planning, managing and delivering in-house CPD to your team, as well as taking part in team learning activities. In other words, you could find yourself involved in developing your colleagues as well as developing yourself. Whichever role you take on, ask the following
questions. your answers will help you to make the learning events you take part in a success for yourself and for your colleagues.
How will our team benefit?
When you start to plan in-house team development events, it is important to ask how specifically a programme will help your team to develop. To find the answer, make a list of team learning
outcomes that you want to achieve. For example, what specifically do you want every one in the team to do better, or to do differently, after the development programme? Which skills do particular individuals need to develop? Will every one, regardless of current skill levels, go through the same learning process? Will development activities be differentiated to allow for the fact that some people are more knowledgeable about the subject matter than others? Agreeing learning outcomes is an important stage
in the CPD process. When you know what you want to achieve via your team learning event, you will be able to plan the event with more confidence.
Which roles will team members take on?
In school life everyone has set responsibilities and accountabilities. you know who to turn to when you need advice about teaching your subject. you know who to ask for support when you need a helping hand with a behaviour issue. Roles change in the learning environment. Those
who normally lead your team in school may be learning alongside you at an in-house CPD event. In the team learning environment, a junior team member could become the team leader. A new-comer could be asked to share specialist expertise. There are other roles to consider, too. In some
learning situations your team will need a facilitator to lead group discussions. In others you may decide to nominate a team member to coach everyone else. What is important, when you come to develop as a
team, is that the roles people take on are clearly defined. People need to know what their roles will be. They also need to be clear about the roles other people will take on. ensure roles are agreed and the details communicated
to all team members in advance in order to help the event to succeed.
What are the team learning rules?
Successful team development activities need learning rules that everyone follows. Defining roles is a good start. Role definition helps to shape the whole group’s expectations of each person’s behaviour.however, you will need rules covering participation in the learning activity, too. This is because without rules there is a danger that
a team learning activity could become just another staff meeting with the learning topic forgotten and the day- to-day school issues becoming the focus of attention. To avoid this, make sure everyone understands
SecEd • January 26 2012
the differences between a learning activity and a staff meeting. one of the ways to do this will be to specify which topics can legitimately be raised in the event and which issues should be kept for another occasion. Appoint an arbitrator whose job it is to ensure that
discussions stay focused on the agreed learning topics and to adjudicate when there are differences of opinion about what can be covered. To learn effectively you will also need a strategy to
help to create a positive team learning environment. To do this, seek agreement from everyone involved that the questions asked during the learning event, the mistakes made, and the problems encountered and then dealt with, will be considered only in the context of the CPD process. Agree that people’s actions and their mistakes will
not be discussed or referred to in team meetings or in appraisals or elsewhere after the CPD programme.
Giving and receiving feedback
It is an interesting aspect of human behaviour that we often find it easier to accept criticism from strangers than from people close to us – including the people we work with. We also often discount or minimise the value we place on praise we receive from people we know well. In team development activities, everyone needs to
be aware of the tendency to behave in these ways, and then to try to avoid them. When you are taking part in a team learning event,
offer praise to anyone who tackles learning activities well. Be prepared to accept praise yourself when you are making progress with learning something new. Draw up rules about how feedback that could be construed as critical will be offered, too. one of the tasks of the person leading the CPD
programme will be to explain to participants what is going wrong when they are struggling with an activity, and then to offer guidance on how to master a new skill or approach. everyone will need to agree to accept this type of feedback constructively to ensure that the team learning process works.
Team learning in the spotlight
Whole-team development delivered through in-house CPD has a lot in its favour, both for individuals and for groups of people in school. however, it needs to be planned, organised and delivered in very particular ways if you are going to make the most of its potential. There is so much that is good about this type
of development. If you put well organised team development in the spotlight this summer, you could find it steals the CPD show in school. .
SecEd
• Margaret Adams is a former teacher and the author ofWork-Life Balance, A Practical Guide For Teachers (David Fulton).
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hen you think about CPD, you probably think first about how best to develop your own practice. That is natural. For a lot of the time CPD focuses on developing individuals.
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